Robust Learning Control for Shipborne Manipulator With Fuzzy Neural Network

The shipborne manipulator plays an important role in autonomous collaboration between marine vehicles. In real applications, a conventional proportional-derivative (PD) controller is not suitable for the shipborne manipulator to conduct safe and accurate operations under ocean conditions, due to its bad tracing performance. This paper presents a real-time and adaptive control approach for the shipborne manipulator to achieve position control. This novel control approach consists of a conventional PD controller and fuzzy neural network (FNN), which work in parallel to realize PD+FNN control. Qualitative and quantitative tests of simulations and real experiments show that the proposed PD+FNN controller achieves better performance in comparison with the conventional PD controller, in the presence of uncertainty and disturbance. The presented PD+FNN eliminates the requirements for precise tuning of the conventional PD controller under different ocean conditions, as well as an accurate dynamics model of the shipborne manipulator. In addition, it effectively implements a sliding mode control (SMC) theory-based learning algorithm, for fast and robust control, which does not require matrix inversions or partial derivatives. Furthermore, simulation and experimental results show that the angle compensation deviation of the shipborne manipulator can be improved in the range of ±1°.